Tuesday, June 09, 2015

An interesting article at Aeonconsiders
"the double lives of Hasidic atheists". Based on interviews,
the piece examines how these individuals reached their conclusions
regarding the existence of a deity and where they have gone from
there. Credit freedom of speech (as the article ought to have) and the
wide availability of modern communications technology for making it
easy to question the fundamental tenet of religion:

[T]hey
are also proof of the increasing challenges fundamentalist religious
groups face in the age of the internet and a globalised world. With so
much information so readily available, such groups can no longer rely
on physical and intellectual isolation to maintain their
boundaries. In addition to exposing religious adherents to information
that challenges the hegemony of their belief systems, the internet
gives individuals living in restrictive environments an alternative
community.

Most interesting to me along these lines was
one such atheist's speculation that the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides was
also secretly an atheist. This reminded me of a friend's similar
speculation about Thomas Aquinas. Considering how pervasively the
lives of fundamentalists and medieval Christians were affected by
religion, the latter speculation made much more sense to me after I
read this.

That said, the article is better at portraying
the social and psychological difficulties these atheists
face:

Yanky cut an incongruous figure. A tall
ultra-Orthodox man with a short, scruffy beard and short side-locks
wrapped behind his ears, wearing traditional Hasidic black-and-white
garb, he was sitting on a barstool in an out-of-the-way dive bar in
South Brooklyn on a Monday afternoon, sipping a Corona. But Yanky is
an incongruous man. Like Solomon, he lives in an Orthodox
neighbourhood, has many children who attend yeshivas, goes to
synagogue to pray, hosts meals on Sabbath. His life, like the life of
any Orthodox Jew, is punctuated a hundred times a day by the small
demands the religion makes on its adherents' lifestyle, demands on
what they can eat, what they can wear, where they can go, what they
can read, whom they can speak to, what they can touch, when they can
touch it, and how often.

Somewhat tragically for a person
so occupied, Yanky doesn't believe in God.

Why would
anyone who rejects the very foundation of so many intrusive rituals
subject himself to this? The answer is usually along these
lines:

[E]ven for those such as Solomon and Yanky who were
educated enough to pursue outside professions, their own psychological
states work just as well as any external rules to keep them put. The
self-policing mechanism kicked in most strongly through the
matchmaking apparatus, the place where status is determined in these
communities. A person leaving the community puts a blight on their
entire family, stigmatising parents, siblings, children, and even
cousins, limiting their ability to marry into "good" families with no
such stain.

In other words, despite having broken the
greatest of their intellectual bonds, they don't go very far. This is
due to the power of unearned guilt and the fact that their
"communities" make sure they and their immediate relatives face
numerous unpleasant consequences for the sin of speaking their
minds. (In the case of women, this often includes being medicated for
mental illness.) On some levels, fear of the repercussions is
understandable as is the lack of fear for allowing their children to
remain in ignorance -- this life is what these men and women know
best. But if there is lots of evidence against the teachings of their
religion, so their is, all around them, that life without faith is
possible. Perhaps such a realization is too much to ask of most
people, perhaps not. Whatever the case, the article is more a
testament to the power of religion to stunt minds than it is of the
Internet to free them.

2 comments:

Penn Gillette talks about his experience with some orthodox Jews (I think one of them was Hasidic) who became atheists and basically had to live secret lives to avoid losing their spouse/children/business/community.

I think the article more shows that social ties are a Big Deal. It takes one kind of courage to break with ideas and another type entirely to make a break with your entire life. Religions are tied hand and foot to the institution of family--when the family organization breaks up, so does the religion.

This may be one reason for the popular statistic that religious people are generally "happier" than atheists. Becoming an atheist often means abandoning all those supportive social ties that are so very necessary for the health and well-being of the human animal. Rebuilding them out of strangers or learning to live without is tough. My parents are both atheists who came from religious families. After years and years of strain they have both now (mostly) reconciled with their families, but I grew up during the period of their greatest mutual estrangement and it weirds them out that I never developed those social ties or even any interest in them--to me, family is just a set of acquaintances I have a few things in common with, nothing more.

I was fortunate in that my parents were from different sects and his family, at least, was non-observant. On top of that, my dad became an atheist shortly before I did. Other experiences have given me some insight into this problem, but nothing did on the level of this article.